“Why do you blog?”

A couple of people recently came to me with the same questions: “Why do you blog? Is it not too personal?”

I started thinking about the reasons why I write and share some of my personal experiences and thoughts and feelings both with people I know and also with a huge potential number of complete strangers.

I’m sure you could find many studies out there regarding new generations and social media psychology. Although I’m definitely part of the social media generation, here I want to focus on my own reasons.

Let’s start from before I opened my blog.

I have always loved reading and writing. I was given the first diary on my 8th birthday, and I started reporting what was happening in my uneventful child life, every day.
From that moment on, I have always kept journals, but not as regularly as the 8th years old Serena used to do.

One of the reasons for a blog is that, if you love writing, you also want to share it with other people sooner or later. For a few years, when I moved to my college town, or even the first couple of years I lived here in Ireland, I used to write letters to two of my best friends regularly. I think opening a blog kind of evolved from that.

At the same time, growing up, the Internet happened, and the time to read shrinked (I became one of those average people who hides more and more behind the excuse of a too busy life).

Anyway, I started surfing that new ocean, and new worlds presented to me, made of different lifestyles, cultures, daily routines, healthy habits, possibilities.

One of the reasons why I opened my blog was because I was loving other blogs.

It also related to my reading likings: biographies and diaries. Blogs are like little daily insights into the life of normal people like us, with particular passions, tastes, who live in far away places, who can teach us something.
I started telling about my experience of moving to Ireland.

Another main reason is linked to my personality.

I’m an introvert, which doesn’t mean I’m shy or that antisocial.
It mainly means that social occasions, or socialising for too long withouth breaks for myself, drain my energy. I don’t take energy from other people, they take mine.

As I said, I don’t look too shy (anymore) when I’m in a social environment. And I enjoy that time, don’t get me wrong! But afterwards, I need my solitary moments of privacy in my own safe place.

This means that I also communicate better with others remotely. I need time and focus to think about what I want to say. I would love to be one of those Irish women who comes to me with a compliment or a nice word so spontaneously.
I’m not, and I’ll probably never be.

But why sharing my things so openly?

Well, as I mentioned before, when you like writing and (often) overthinking about life, you want to share it with other people. And the best people to get feedback from, are strangers.

If you are not familiar with blogs, you can’t imagine the surprising reactions you receive and give to others on your or their sharing activities.
Just talking about a misadventure can take to comments from people who lived the same experience, who can give tips to you and the other readers, or just show the support of a stranger.

I personally like to follow small blogs, who are free to say what they want to say, in the limits of mutual respect of course.

There are a few topics I like reading about, but I’ll tell you about it in my next post.

Do you like blogs too?
Or maybe you have one yourself? What reasons made you open one?